Good news for bees and recycling, and time to learn about garlic!

It’s the last month of Autumn, but with the near-total lack of rain you’d barely know it. The weather has been rather mild of late, so you’d certainly forgive the plant-life for being confused!

One great thing about autumn is the leaves in the street, and the little fluffy clouds that race across the sky. It’s a great time to go walking in the forests to see the amazing autumn colours that the deciduous trees show before shedding their leaves to the ground below. To honour these wonderful places, our song of the month goes to UK rock band The Cure with their 80s underground hit A Forest.

Permablitz News

It's International Permaculture Day this weekend!

International Permaculture Day is on the first Sunday of May and is a day of celebration and action for permaculture around the world. It is a day when visitors can see these myriad initiatives, ask questions of their developers and decide for themselves whether the permaculture design system has relevance to the challenges we face and to creating communities that are resilient in the face of undesirable and unforeseeable impacts.

Desperately seeking documenter volunteers!

Do you write good and stuff? Are you tired of missing out on Permablitzes before they book out, and wish that you had a golden ticket to be able to get in to any booked-out blitz? (Including those for this merry month of May?) Then this may be the gig for you!

We’re looking for people armed with a camera and a pen who can capture the day’s events in a bunch of paragraphs and technicolour photos. You don’t need a PDC or a journalism degree – just enthusiasm, a good eye and the ability to describe the blitz better than a bear ever could.

Hero of the Month

Garlic

The best cloves to plant are those you’ve got from a friend who has successfully grown garlic before

Tis the season for colds and flu so what better way to make it through than chewing down on what you grew: garlic!

The important thing to remember about growing garlic, is that you’ll need to source untreated bulbs. Commonly, imported garlic is treated with chemicals to retard the sprouting process for longer shelf life. Even commercially available domestic garlic can often be subject to the same fate, so go with a local organics supplier or a trusted friend.

Beets and Pieces

EU agrees total ban on bee-harming pesticides

The world’s most widely used insecticides will be banned from all fields within six months, to protect both wild and honeybees that are vital to crop pollination

The European Union will ban the world’s most widely used insecticides from all fields due to the serious danger they pose to bees.

The ban on neonicotinoids, approved by member nations on Friday, is expected to come into force by the end of 2018 and will mean they can only be used in closed greenhouses.

Australia Is Set to Ban Non-Recyclable Packaging By 2025

Australia’s war on waste has received a significant boost, with the Federal Government pledging to ensure that 100 percent of the country’s packaging is recyclable, compostable or reusable in the next seven years.

Announced last week, the target will be implemented by 2025 or earlier. The Commonwealth will also work with state and territory governments to increase the nation’s recycling capabilities — and prioritise ‘waste-to-energy’ projects, which convert waste that is unable to be recycled into energy.

Also on the agenda: ramping up the purchase of recyclable materials by the various levels of government by using more recycled paper, and building roads and construction projects out of recycled mattter.

In the Garden

May is the last month of autumn, and the weather will soon start to get really cold! This is a time for pruning, dividing perennials, and putting in new trees, shrubs and vines. It’s also the time to clean up the garden, remove dead, diseased or excess branches and plants, and start collecting all the wonderful leaves which can be used for mulching and compost!

All this free mulch – just there for the taking!

Some suburbs are well known for the massive amounts of leaves that fall, and you can sometimes see die-hard gardeners collecting the fallen leaves in garbage bags – it’s free mulch after all!

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About Permablitz Melbourne

Welcome to Permablitz Melbourne - where we get together and have fun learning about, designing and implementing suburban permaculture systems. Our focus is edible gardens, and our ultimate aim is to make the suburbs edible enough such that should food become unaffordable, we don’t even notice.